Survey update after 2 weeks

It has been another amazing week for the survey!

3 new projects joined, Python, Wikimedia, and Fedora (Welcome!), and a lot more people took part in the survey. Thanks!

More than 500 people took part in the survey! This is just simply amazing.

Out of those 500+ respondents, 262 people (from 52 different countries!) submitted full survey responses. Here is the response distribution per project:

Debian: 55
FreeBSD: 10
Gentoo: 13
GNOME: 37
KDE: 41
Mozilla: 19
NetBSD: 8
OpenSUSE: 17
Python: 8
Ubuntu: 44
Wikimedia: 10

The survey is still live until the end of the month. The closing date has been postponed a little to give more time to people from projects which have just joined the survey. There is still time for those who still want to take part.

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6 comments on “Survey update after 2 weeks”

I’m concerned by the requirement of being a continuing contributor making regular contributions for 6 months. Your survey is biased toward those who have positive experiences. The ones who had negative experiences left 5 months ago.

Hi MacKenzie,
There is indeed some inherent bias since, like you are saying, people who had very bad experiences have left and then did not take part in the study. This is some common problem in social sciences as it is usually hard to capture any data from people who are dissatisfied or else gone.
It was a tricky issue in this survey to define conditions to participate that would be simple, not be too strict (then jeopardizing sample size) or too loose (including people who do not properly qualify). The overall scope of this research is about active contributors and their benefits to the projects. The 6-months limit is a way to exclude lurkers even though they obviously have their own importance such as facilitating cross-project knowledge flows.
I agree the 6-months activity condition is far from being perfect, but it is the best compromise I found. Suggestions welcome
Thanks for your comment!